Finding jobs: Kuster thinks she helps

U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster’s office has organized a job fair at the Holiday Inn in downtown Concord on Thursday, which is ironic. When she is in New Hampshire she tries to match people with jobs, and when she is in Washington she works to make jobs vanish.

Kuster does not intend to reduce employment opportunities for Granite Staters. It is just that she supports policies that have that result. And even after those policies are shown to reduce job opportunities, she continues to promote them.

Take Obamacare (please!). The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that because of Medicaid expansion and health insurance subsidies, the Affordable Care Act will cause people to stop working. The CBO says the equivalent of 2.5 million jobs will be vacated as a result.

The White House and top Democrats spin this as liberating Americans from work. But becoming dependent on the state is not liberation.

Obamacare liberates no one. It fosters dependency. This is by design. The more Americans who become dependent on the government, the more voters the Party of Government creates for itself.

Kuster supports another policy that has similar effects — raising the minimum wage. There is abundant evidence that raising the minimum wage depresses employment among low-income, low-skilled Americans. It is not that a lot of people are fired when minimum wages are raised. It is that others are not hired at all.

Kuster believes that these job fairs will help her chances in November. The fairs are fine, and if they match people with jobs, then kudos to her for putting them together. But the fact that employment is still shaky enough that members of Congress feel the need to hold job fairs years after the recession officially ended is hardly a ringing endorsement of the economic policies of the President and his enablers in Washington like Annie Kuster.

It is pretty clear by now that the longer she stays in office, the more of these job fairs Granite Staters are going to need.